A celebration of Australia’s current golden
age of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and magical realism. Jack Dann ‒
multi-award-winning author and co-editor of the classic Dreaming Down-Under,
the first Australian book to win a World Fantasy Award ‒ has collected a
wonderfully eclectic range of short fiction that showcases what our best
fantasists are doing right now in these genre-bending times.

Verity Fassbinder has her feet in two
worlds. The daughter of one human and one Weyrd parent, she has very little
power herself, but does claim unusual strength and the ability to walk between
us and the other as a couple of her talents. As such a rarity, she is charged
with keeping the peace between both races, and ensuring the Weyrd remain hidden
from us.

There are many grief holes. There’s the
grief hole you fall into when a loved one dies. There’s another grief hole in
all of us; small or large, it determines how much we want to live. And there
are the places, the physical grief holes, that attract suicides to their
centre.

Sol Evictus, a powerful charismatic singer,
sends a young artist into The Grief Hole to capture the faces of the teenagers
dying there. When the artist inevitably dies herself, her cousin Theresa
resolves to stop this man so many love.

Battle-scarred warrior princess Bluebell,
heir to her father’s throne, is rumoured to be unkillable. So when she learns
of a sword wrought specifically to slay her by the fearsome raven king, Hakon,
she sets out on a journey to find it before it finds her. The sword is rumoured
to be in the possession of one of her four younger sisters. But which one?

The tenth year war is coming. Carrie Welles
has survived more attacks than she can count, but each one has made her
stronger. She refuses to be a victim any more. While her nemesis, Sharley,
continues to be a threat, she works with Harris and the Aurora team to protect
the future, vowing to raise her children and fight as the soldier-mother she was
destined to be.

This dark fantasy collection features
nineteen stories, including the Australian Shadows Award-winning ‘Shadows of
the Lonely Dead’, and two stories never before published.

‘Alan Baxter is an accomplished storyteller
who ably evokes magic and menace. Whether it’s stories of ghost-liquor and
soul-draining blues, night club magicians, sinister western pastoral
landscapes, or a suburban suicide – Crow Shine has a mean bite.’—Laird
Barron, author of Swift to Chase

‘Crow Shine, by Alan Baxter, is a
sweeping collection of horror and dark fantasy stories, packed with misfits and
devils, repentant fathers and clockwork miracles. Throughout it all, Baxter
keeps his focus on the universal problems of the human experience: the search
for understanding, for justice, and for love. It’s an outstanding
book."—Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

One of the most inspirational scenes in the movie The
Martian was where Matt Damon’s astronaut, marooned on the red planet and facing
certain death, decided to ‘science the shit’ out of his problem. It
encapsulated the strong belief that used to dominate our world: that science can
solve our problems.

Right now, we’re seeing the rise of a new breed of populist
politicians who ignore the facts and look on science with disdain because it
doesn’t fit the narrative they’re peddling. Science is no longer the solution,
scientists are viewed with suspicion, and meanwhile the planet is going to
hell.

It’s hard for normal people to fathom the self-serving
cynical depths to which pollies like One Nation Senator Malcom Roberts sink,
rejecting the mountain of evidence on climate change as some kind of
‘scientific con game’; or the pronouncement last year by one-time Environment
Minister Greg Hunt that the Great Barrier Reef had been taken off the World
Heritage Endangered List when the latest reports from the Marine Park Authority
Director show it’s in more danger of destruction than ever before. As for
president-elect Donald Trump’s promise to walk away from the Paris Climate
Change Treaty, and his chief of staff’s statement that climate denial will be
the ‘default position’ of the Trump administration, words fail me. We are in
deep shit.

Our new Environment (in name only) and Energy Minister Josh
Frydenberg recently welcomed Trump’s announcement that he would lift
restrictions on fossil fuel exploration, commenting that it would be ‘good for
consumers’. We’ve already breached 400 parts per million concentration of CO2
in our atmosphere, which means we’re headed for environmental disaster. All the
carbon we have in the ground needs to stay there. Scientists have proved it
time and again. But after the recent power outage in South Australia ‒ which
had nothing to do with that state’s reliance on renewable energy and everything
to do with the extreme weather events predicted by climate scientists ‒
Frydenberg is talking up ‘energy security’. This is code for turning your back
on scientific development and increasing the mining and use of fossil fuels. It
gets worse. Just last week the government pledged $1 billion to fund a railway
to the new Carmichael coal mine, and shelved plans for an emissions credit
scheme in the face of criticism from the far right. It seems our government is
ignoring science and backing nineteenth-century technology.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Ireland, which generates a
little under 25% of its energy needs from wind power, is trialling a new
technology to bridge the gap between renewable energy and storage batteries.
When renewable supply drops, the grid needs to be able to quickly compensate
for the energy gap to give batteries enough time to come up to speed. The answer
is not to augment supply with coal power but to use ultracapacitors. Standard
capacitors in your phone supply a quick burst of energy to power the camera
flash. The first capacitors used carbon derived from coconut husks. But since
then there’s been a huge amount of development in this field using new
materials, and tests in the US show that grids with ultracapacitor backups are
10–15% more efficient than battery-only setups.

The scientific progress of our industrial civilisation has
caused a lot of problems, but it has also improved our lives immeasurably. That
continued progress is the only thing that will save us. Telling lies or
repeating the mistakes of the past – like approving the Carmichael coal
mine – will get us nowhere. As Ayn Rand
said, ‘We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading
reality.’

This article originally appeared in Beyond, my free
newsletter for lovers of science and science fiction. Sign up here -
http://eepurl.com/btvru1

Thursday, December 1, 2016

The golden age of science fiction often
imagined Venus as a jungle world, steamy and wet, where shipwrecked astronauts
were driven insane by the incessant pounding of tropical downpours, as in Ray
Bradbury’s ‘The Long Rain’.

The reality of Venus is a world that’ssearingly hot, covered in toxic clouds and
with a corrosive atmosphere that’s inimical to life as we know it. But, just as
the current exploration of Mars is finding evidence that surface water was once
present on that arid planet, another group of scientists is investigating the
history of our warmer sister planet.

Earth and Venus have a lot in common:
they’re about the same size and density, and the fact that they formed around
the same time in the primordial solar system suggests they share a lot of the
same materials. Venus has a high ratio of deuterium to hydrogen atoms in its
atmosphere, which suggests the planet contained a substantial amount of water
at one time that could – as on Earth – have hosted the building blocks of life.
NASA is currently considering two options for remote exploration of Venus,
including a high resolution mapping mission and the tortuously acronymed Deep
Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI)
mission, both of which could rewrite our understanding of Venus and how we
think about potentially life-bearing extra-solar planets in the future.

This article originally appeared in Beyond,
my free newsletter for lovers of science and science fiction. Sign up here - http://eepurl.com/btvru1

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SF quotes

"the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture."— Iain M. Banks